Progressive Democrats Are Gaslighting the American People

Definition of Gaslighting: The manipulation of someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.

For an extended period of time, the Democratic Party has been gaslighting the American people. They accelerated their efforts when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016. They redoubled their endeavors during Joe Biden’s administration with the epidemic of “cancel culture.” If you are for Trump and against Joe Biden, you are not just insane. In fact, you must be so insane you are positively evil, a fascist, a racist, and an enemy of democracy.

If progressive Democrats are successful in propagating their lies, they will be the ones who will destroy American democracy. They are guilty of every charge they have hurled at Republicans. Let us take a look at the facts.

The Progressive Point of View

The progressives now in charge of the Democratic Party have long held the view that most ordinary people are incapable of solving most of their problems on their own. This has been true for over a century since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

What has motivated progressives is precisely what motivated Pres. Woodrow Wilson to start the process of building the regulatory state. In a 1912 speech while campaigning for his first term as President, Wilson declared he wanted Americans to take the Constitution as a “living”, evolving document. Instead of a Constitution guaranteeing ironclad rights for individuals, Wilson wanted a Constitution constantly evolving the relationship between government and its citizens. Instead of a separation of powers between the government’s branches, Wilson believed society’s needs required close coordination between the branches.

In particular, President Wilson believed much power to rule should be taken away from the political branches of government and transferred to technocrats in the regulatory state. After all, the political branches of government — the Congress and the executive branch — were susceptible to influence by the common people. The technocrats of the regulatory state should run the nation insulated from the passions and ignorance of most of the electorate.

Working in tandem with this prejudice for autocratic rule is an almost childlike faith in the competence and capability of governments to solve or at least ameliorate almost all economic and social problems. This is despite a huge amount of empirical evidence directly attacking any such faith. To see some of this evidence see the post How Much Human Freedom Can We Find in the World? To see the reasons why we would expect governments to be incapable of solving many social and economic problems, see the post How Is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy?

When their policies do not work out as they think they should, Democrats need to find a scapegoat. They have found several. These include “price-gouging” corporations, the Republican Party, and national institutions they believe systemically disadvantage minorities and poor people. The intellectual support for this last scapegoat is provided by critical theory and critical race theory.

In what follows we will see that the naming of these scapegoats is entirely a Democratic Party exercise in gaslighting the public.

Are Republicans Fascists and Enemies of Democracy?

How better to gaslight the electorate than to stick your political opponents with the label “enemies of democracy.” Whether or not most Democrats believe that of Republicans — and there is some question of that — the Biden Administration and the progressives supporting it certainly believe it. Below is a video of a Joe Biden speech saying American democracy is threatened by the Republicans.

To be fair, Biden limits his accusations to “MAGA” Republicans, who he says now dominate the Republican Party. Given the evidence of the successes of Republican primary candidates Trump has endorsed, Republicans who support Trump’s policies do indeed dominate the party. The fact many of those candidates were uncontested testifies to the strength of MAGA Republicans.

Biden claims MAGA Republicans do not respect the rule of law and the Constitution. He says they promote authoritarian leaders and fan the flames of political violence. He asserts they are a threat to our individual rights. Incredibly, he even claims Republicans believe citizens do not have the right to marry whom they love! (Where did that come from?)

So what are the facts? Although Biden did not use the word “fascism” in this speech, in another fund-raising speech in Bethesda, Maryland he accused MAGA Republicans of being semi-fascists. Yet, just how accurate is the charge of fascism?

Fascism is one of two major forms of socialism, the other being communism. Long ago during the 1940s, fascism was widely considered in Great Britain and the U.S. to be the endpoint of capitalism. However, a young Austrian economist at the time, Friedrich Hayek, noted there was not a dime’s worth of difference between Adolph Hitler’s fascist Germany and Stalin’s communist Soviet Union. His basic insight was the traditional definition of socialism as the state ownership of the means of production was insufficient and inaccurate. Instead of state ownership, it was state control of the means of production that marked socialism. It mattered not a whit if there was private ownership if the state controlled the means of production.

It should be noted in passing that socialism and free-market capitalism are polarly opposite Platonic ideals. In the modern usage of the phrase, a Platonic ideal is something that can be approached but never reached. When we say a country is socialist or free-market capitalist, what we really mean is that country’s economy most closely approaches one of those Platonic ideals.

What do we mean when we accuse a political faction of being fascist? Clearly, we must mean that that political party is seeking greater government control over the economy. So which of the two major U.S. political parties is looking for greater government control? It certainly is not Trump’s Republican Party. Indeed, one of Trump’s proudest achievements was a judicious reduction of economic regulation by the regulatory state. Trump made a point of eliminating at least one regulation for every new one added. The Biden administration, on the other hand, has sought much greater control of the economy through federal regulations [see here, and here, and here, and here]. It would seem Democrats are falsely accusing Republicans of being exactly what the Democrats are.

It is the Democrat Party that is the more authoritarian party. Greater control over the economy gives Democrats the means to enforce their demands over everyone. This fact is particularly noticeable in the Democratic war on fossil fuels. It was also scarily apparent in Democrats’ aborted attempt to institute a Disinformation Governance Board to “cancel” opposing views.

Why then are Democrats indicting Republicans for being fascists? They must be hoping if people believe these assertions, the electorate will be shamed into voting for Democrats. It is an obvious example of gaslighting.

The Lies Democrats Tell About the American Economy

A very consequential example of Democrats’ gaslighting is their constantly changing set of explanations for our economic problems. The entire period of Biden’s administration has been marked by severe supply chain breakdowns. It has also been characterized by the highest inflation in 40 years.

The Biden Administration’s explanations for all these problems redirect blame away from their own policies to other putative causes. At various times, they have assigned fault to the covid-19 pandemic, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Americans’ increasing demand for goods for supply chain breakdowns. As for the causes of inflation, Democrats again point to all the causes of supply chain breakdowns (particularly Putin’s Ukraine war) as well as price gouging by corporations. So why should we not believe all this gaslighting?

We should acknowledge there is a small grain of truth in some of their explanations. The Covid-19 pandemic and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine did indeed reduce the world’s supply of goods. As other nations shut down their economies to deal with the covid-19 pandemic, foreign supply of many goods was interrupted. The Ukraine war packed a double whammy for the world economy. As retaliation to the West’s opposition to his Ukraine war, Putin is boycotting the supply of oil and gas to the West, particularly to Western Europe. In addition, Ukraine is one of the world’s largest exporters of corn, wheat, and other agricultural goods. By denying these goods to the international market, the Ukraine war has contributed to both supply chain breakdowns and inflation in food prices. However, the claim Americans’ are causing supply chain disruptions by their increasing demand for goods is just plain crazy. It puts the cart before the horse. Supply chain problems are caused by a lack of supply, not by an increase in demand.

Although international problems affect supply chains, the biggest influence on our supply chains is Democrats’ economic policies that amount to a war on U.S. production. Recently, I wrote a post on how progressive Democrats are attempting to violate all of the classical laws of economics. (You can see a brief review of these classical laws and an explanation of why they still matter here.) Their war on economic supply has several motivations. One is their historical hatred for corporations. Another is their misguided war on the production of fossil fuels. Yet another is their belief that free-market capitalism inevitably leads to a highly unequal distribution of wealth among the population. This last progressive myth is an outgrowth of their belief in the Iron Law of Wages, most recently defended by the French economist Thomas Pikkety. It is most easily rebutted by plotting the Gini index of all the countries on Earth versus their economic freedom. I did this recently in the post How Much Human Freedom Can We Find in the World? The Gini index is constructed so that it is 100 when all the GDP is earned by one individual and everyone else gets nothing. It is zero when it is equally distributed across the entire population. I use the Cato/Fraser economic freedom index in the scatter plot below. It has the value zero when a country has no individual economic freedom at all and the state totally controls the economy. It has the value 10 when there is total economic freedom for individuals and the state has no control over the economy. In this plot, each dot represents a single country in 2018.

The dashed red line in the plot is the linear best fit of all the data. It clearly has a negative slope. This means, all other factors being equal, a country’s Gini index will become smaller as its economic freedom increases. That is, the more economic freedom a country has, the more equally distributed will its GDP be.

What Democrats want to do with their gaslighting is to distract you from an important fact. Their political war on economic production is preventing the U.S. from substituting new domestic American supply for lost foreign supply of goods.

Among the most important of their barriers to domestic production is raised by their war on fossil fuels. The availability of energy affects almost everything else that happens in a modern economy. It affects the transportation of goods, the travel of workers to work and back, the use of machinery, and the production of fertilizers to sustain large crops. If energy is not available to sustain all these functions, economies collapse.

During the Trump administration, the U.S. was moving toward self-sufficiency in fossil fuels. However, on the first day of the following Biden Administration, President Biden signed three executive orders that attacked domestic fossil fuel production. One was an order to halt new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. In recent months, due to the political uproar over energy inflation, Biden has backtracked and allowed the resumption of oil and gas leasing. However, getting a lease does not give an oil company the permission to drill.

The Biden Administration has repeatedly stated there are 9,000 unused oil drilling permits on federal lands. It has asked Congress to increase fees on leases that oil companies “haven’t used in years and on acres of public lands that they are hoarding without producing.” Yet, drilling on both federal and private lands is often stopped by complex regulatory processes (such as expanded environmental impact statements) and/or litigation before courts. All of these factors can discourage companies from making very expensive investments. This is especially true as oil company managements recall that Biden has sworn to destroy them.

The government barriers against fossil fuel production have naturally led to a greater rate of inflation in those fuels. Since mid-June, gas prices had fallen slightly. The Biden Administration claimed the fall was due primarily to its release of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. However, the biggest reason was actually a large reduction in demand. Faced with very high gas prices, most people have severely reduced their driving. At any rate, the fall in gas prices was ephemeral. It has now resumed its climb.

Yet the Democrats’ war on fossil fuels is only the beginning of their bad economic policies. In addition, they flatter themselves that they can run an efficient industrial policy directing investment of public and private capital to needed projects. A flurry of new laws, including the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), all are Congressional authorizations for a Biden industrial policy. However, Democrats’ optimism that this industrial policy will boost economic growth is greatly misplaced.

Some of these laws support very worthwhile goals. For example, the CHIPS Act encourages new semiconductor production within the U.S. to reduce our dependency on uncertain Chinese semiconductor supply. However, most of the new investment in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing was going to happen anyway. A recognition of the unreliability of Chinese supply chains together with increasing demand was already stimulating U.S. semiconductor companies to increase U.S. manufacturing. Investments by Samsung, Intel, and Taiwan Manufacturing Company were made in 2021, well before passage of the CHIPS Act. Semiconductor investments were being made by private companies because they made economic sense. For the government to throw more money at semiconductors will only encourage inflation by unduly increasing the money supply.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has the very needed goal of improving and maintaining public roads, bridges, and airports. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated the cost imposed by congestion, excessive travel time and other inefficiencies on unimproved infrastructure is $500 billion in lost GDP each year. It also estimated it would take $2.7 trillion in public investments to remedy the problem. Yet the IIJA will only add $550 billion in new money for infrastructure investments. At the same time, the act will throw $7.5 billion to building a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles. While the act does not spend enough on needed infrastructure, it is encouraging the use of electric vehicles before cost-efficient battery technology is available. [Also, see here.] This is a common problem for government industrial policies. They make inefficient use of scarce capital that otherwise could be used more productively elsewhere in the economy.

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act, on the other hand, is a total catastrophe. The government claim that this act will do anything to reduce inflation is gaslighting at its purest. Nothing in it does anything to reduce inflation directly. However, its nonlinear effects on the economy will cause a reduction in wealth production that will inevitably increase inflation. While this new law increases subsidies for some people buying some goods (e.g. medicines), nothing in it does anything to increase the supply of those goods. With more money chasing medicines and medical care, inflation for those goods and services must increase.

Perhaps the most economically destructive aspect of the new law is the imposition of a 15 % minimum corporate income tax, and a 1 % excise tax on corporate stock buybacks. The main concern of progressives seems to be to insure rich people do not profit very much from stock ownership. Yet, whenever the rich do profit, it is from either selling their stock or from receiving stock dividends. In both those events, the stock owners are taxed for capital gains or for new income.

So long as corporate income is retained within the company, it is used to increase the company’s ability to produce more wealth needed by customers. If the government taxes it away, GDP must necessarily be smaller than it would otherwise be. Companies will have less to invest in new productive capability, less to raise wages to retain scarce skilled labor, and less to buy intermediate goods needed to produce finished goods. A smaller GDP is intrinsically inflationary.

The American People Are Catching On To Democratic Gaslighting

When you speak untruths most of the time, eventually people will catch onto your lies. That many people are beginning to disbelieve Democratic politicians and their propaganda wing in the mainstream media can be seen in several ways. One way is by noting the shifting allegiances of one-time Democratic voting blocks.

For example, for many decades the majority of working class whites were mostly Democrats. However, beginning with Trump’s 2016 campaign, they have steadily moved to the Republican Party. Certainly, economic anxiety caused by bad Democratic economic policies might be part of the reason. However, there is a lot of evidence that the progressives’ culture wars were the main whip driving working class whites into the Republican Party. See here and here and here. Making whites feel like strangers in their own land is not a good political tactic. In addition, their cultural values are more traditional and conservative.

There was a time when Democrats had a lock on the votes of Hispanics. However, ever since the 2016 elections, and for much the same reasons as for working class whites, Hispanic Americans have migrated towards the Republican Party. What should really panic Democrats is Hispanics tend to favor the hardline Republican views on illegal immigration. The Democrats’ leftward lurch on many policies — “defund the police,” abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy, greater government control over the economy, is alienating many Hispanics.

To a much lesser extent even some black voters, especially black men, are leaving the progressive bandwagon. Democrats still have a 25 % edge over Republicans for the favor of black voters. This result came from a July New York Times/Siena College poll. An average of the CNN/SSRS, Fox, Marist College, Monmouth University and The New York Times showed black voters favoring Democrats over Republicans with a 30 % edge. This is still very large, but considerably smaller by historical standards. The racial gap between whites and blacks was 64 points in the 2018 midterm House elections. This gap was 63 points in the 2020 elections. Now it has declined to between 25 and 30 points.

Yet another way to measure voter disenchantment with Democrats is with how much they trust the news media. It is almost common knowledge that most of the news media favor progressive Democrats. This assertion is supported by the following Pew Research plot of the ideological spectrum of major news media in 2014.

If most of the news media have increasingly left-of-center biases we should see confidence in them decline over time. This can be seen in the following chart of media trust between 1993 and 2022.

The fact this decline in media trust is due to a perception of increasingly leftist bias can be seen in the following chart.

This chart uses data between 1997 and 2020. However, given the nation’s history since Biden took office, we would expect the trends of these plots to have continued. Note the trust in news media by Democrats has actually strengthened, while that of both independents and Republicans has fallen.

It would seem most Americans are catching on to the Democratic Party’s gaslighting. It cannot continue for much longer.

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